Dumping or burning of solid refuse has become an unattractive option for most cities, towns, and villages. In order to make recycling easier and thereby effectively stem the steady flow of refuse into incinerators, landfills, and waterways, many municipalities and waste management companies have embraced alternatives to dumping or burning refuse. Refuse recycling as an alternative to refuse dumping and incineration has gained widespread popularity.
In order to save time, money, and manpower during the recycling process, municipalities have urged their citizens to help clean up the environment and battle the waste disposal problem by sorting their own refuse into recyclable and non-recyclable items before collection. Nonetheless, often recyclable and non-recyclable wastes will be combined in a common receptacle. Thousands of tons of potentially recyclable materials are still routinely buried, burned or dumped into the sea along with biodegradable and non-recyclable waste. More economical and efficient refuse processing methods may allow recycling to reduce levels of refuse consigned to landfills or incinerators.
Much household and business refuse today is collected in plastic refuse bags which are secured in various fashions and then left for pick-up to be trucked to refuse processing plants. For consumer convenience and health reasons, these plastic bags are deliberately structurally engineered to forego degradation and tearing. Moreover, because refuse contained within the plastic bags is often very sharp and inflexible, refuse bags are designed to stretch or to tear slightly to prevent further propagation. Therefore, because plastic refuse bags are designed to resist breakage, the refuse bags are difficult to open during processing, and thus complicate the entire recycling process.
Additionally, the process of collecting, loading and unloading the refuse bags, breaking the bags open, and sorting and separating the refuse manually into recyclable and non-recyclable materials is an unpleasant and time-consuming task.
In the past, if municipal refuse was processed at waste processing facilities at all, it was normally shredded or pulverized in hammer mills or similar devices. The shredding and pulverizing machines generally left a compact, useless mixture of recyclable and non-recyclable material ready only for the incinerator or the landfill. Some conventional bag breaking devices and recycling machines currently being used in the industry, roughly cut, gouge, and tear open refuse bags breaking and destroying glass containers and other potentially recyclable material within, thus contaminating the remainder of the refuse flow and creating more unusable wastes. Additionally, many modern bag breaking devices often have complex moving parts and shafts that may become tangled and wrapped with bags, cloth, wire, or rope or clogged with refuse and eventually become inoperative. Further, the sorting of recyclable and non-recyclable goods typically requires the aid of manual labor.
What is needed is a simple, economical, low maintenance, and efficient device to aid in the sorting and separating of refuse that minimizes the possibility for damage to the potentially recyclable contents within the refuse bag.